Brooklyn, NY

Category: Elsewhere

Bush Terminal Park is my favorite park in the entire city, mostly because it’s quiet and nobody knows about it. That’s why I decided to disrupt the peace I’ve enjoyed for nearly two years by telling the readers at Brokelynwhy it’s so great.

Among the new retail chains and makeshift EDM venues, however, was a small piece of heaven tucked away behind condemned warehouses and leftover trolley tracks. After decades and planning and two years of building, Bush Terminal Park quietly opened its gates in November of 2014 on the corner of 43rd Street and 1st Avenue. Yet nearly two years later, residents living in proximity to the park still do not know of its existence.

It was brought to my attention that I appear to only write about wrestling. Thanks to the lovely rapport I have with the folks at AiPT, I can write about wrestling as often as I want. My other freelance endeavors, however, are slightly less frequent yet more diverse in terms of what I cover — save for an outstanding freelance assignment I have about wrestling. So it goes.

Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose realize the strange rules they’re competing under and the conditions that see them continuously fighting each other do not matter in life, for we are all going to die one day and the match will mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. They both say to hell with wrestling, leave the ring, and are later found in group therapy talking about their problems with anger and work.

I also wrote an article about the WWE Draft and what it means for the future of the WWE.

The men’s and women’s main event scenes are pretty stacked on Raw, while SmackDown has slightly fewer established acts. One could only hope that a few of the wrestlers drafted to SmackDown, most who originate from NXT, could eventually established as main event players. Otherwise, it’ll be John Cena winning again and again.

As a fan, I now have to watch two live shows every week to see my favorite wrestlers instead of simply suffering through a weekly, three-hour Raw. Sure, this means two extra hours of content with unique storylines, titles, and factions that are independent from each show. As a working person with a “life,” however, it’s a tad more complicated than that.

The WWE Draft is next week, and I’m covering it this week (and next week) on AiPT. Today, I wrote about the sheer amount of time one needs to invest in the product.

There’s never a bad time to get into pro wrestling. Sure, there are the weeksmonthsyears times when the product is less than stellar, but such is the nature of all serialized fiction. And like comic books, you can’t conceivably start from the beginning and work your way through every individual match, episode, and pay-per-view without going mad.

Luckily, if you’re just starting to watch WWE for the first time or picking it up after a lengthy absence, you couldn’t have picked a better time to do so. First, WrestleMania is a little over a month old, meaning most storylines have ended and the WWE is theoretically on the start of its “next season.” Second, there are big changes going on in the WWE, including the addition of new wrestlers and a bigger spotlight on women’s wrestling.

I wrote a primer on how non-wrestling fans can actually catch up with the current product. It’s easily the most fun I’ve had writing about wrestling (and my favorite piece on AiPT) so far.

Wrestling is a lot like comic books. It has characters and tropes that stick around for decades. It works in the confines of dated rules that would be pointless to break. Most importantly, it has a seemingly never-ending narrative that uses said characters to tell compelling and hyper-stylized stories on a regular schedule.

Unlike comic book characters, however, the wrestlers telling a story in and around the squared circle are real human beings. They act as characters completely separate from their real-world identities, putting their bodies on the line night after night for the advancement of a story and the crowd’s amusement. They experience actual pain, real injuries, and often tragic events.

I wrote for AIPT! again, this time about the (mis)treatment of wrestlers and common misconceptions about the business.

You can read my article here. If you haven’t read Ryan Reeves/Ryback’s post on the subject, you should do so here.

The idea of getting back onto a bike came to me five years later, when I lost my editing job in the summer of 2014. All my newfound free time as an unemployed adult came with a new determination to check off some major to-do’s in my life: applying to grad school, finishing The Wire, and, of course, learning how to ride a bike.

The first two proved to be particularly soul-crushing, while the latter seemed rather silly at the age of 27. I could do my own taxes and had taught myself guitar, but I still couldn’t get on a bike.

I finally wrote about how I learned to ride a bike as an adult for Brokelyn. It’s something I’ve been meaning to write for a couple of years now.

If you’ve ever stepped off the train in South Slope/Greenwood Heights/whatever, you passed Supercollider and probably didn’t even realize it. Their signs in front of its location on Fourth Avenue between 17th and 18th streets were always barely lit and hard to read. The adjacent buildings were all but vacant and plastered with poison warnings. Even when compared to the mostly-desolate stretch of Fourth Avenue north of the bar, it still seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere.

But hidden behind its humble entrance was a large, friendly place that served as an offbeat hangout for people looking to get more than a few drinks in them, creative types looking to hone their craft and everyone in between. They were all strangely drawn to the allure of a lonely little bar in a part of town where places with more notoriety were only a block away on Fifth Avenue.

I wrote on Brokelyn about the closing of Supercollider, a neighborhood bar where the fabulous Christy Hall worked at and frequented.

Now, Anderson and Gallows have finally debuted on Raw, apparently with an invasion angle in the vein Scott Hall and Kevin Nash’s 1996 WCW debut. But while we still know little about what storylines the two will take part in, let’s take a look at how they got to WWE, and where they could potentially go from here.

I wrote another post about wrestling for AiPT, this time about the debut of Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows.

This week, six wrestlers, including two tag teams, were called up from WWE’s developmental system and made full-fledged WWE superstars. While some WWE Network subscribers and the more hardcore fans might already be familiar with these men through NXT, many fans are seeing them for the first time. So before they become deeply entrenched in WWE programming, take a second to get to know the latest additions to the WWE main roster.

My first post for AiPT is up. I’m writing about pro wrestling for them on a regular basis, so keep an eye out for more features and PPV recaps.